H-Bombs on a Hair Trigger

ENLARGE

U.S. soldiers watching an atomic bomb test in Nevada in 1951.
Bettmann/Corbis

By

Arthur Herman

Updated Feb. 12, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

At the peak of the Cold War, L. Douglas Keeney informs us, the U.S. had some 34,000 American nuclear weapons aimed at no less than 4,000 targets, most of them large industrial centers inside the Soviet Union. In terms of megatonnage, that's roughly 13 Hiroshimas per target. The Soviet nuclear-attack plan against America was only slightly less lethal.

It all sounds a bit crazy. At the time the strategy was called MAD, for Mutually Assured Destruction. Movies like "Dr. Strangelove" and "Fail-Safe" conveyed the notion that we had indeed put our fate in the hands of madmen.

Mr. Keeney's "15 Minutes" offers a very different picture of what was going on in those early days of the Cold War. Far from being a wild and irrational idea, America's nuclear doctrine grew out of a careful attempt to address real-life problems—both strategic and technological—and to manage a constantly shifting political landscape. The 15 minutes of the title was the time that the big bombers of Strategic Air Command needed to get aloft in the event of a nuclear attack—but also the 15 minutes that an American president had to decide, once Soviet bombers or missiles were detected entering U.S. air space, whether to launch a full nuclear exchange.

That no president ever did so was a tribute to the concept of nuclear deterrence and to the men who flew the B-47s and B-52s that ultimately kept America safe during 40 years of international tension—and always within a hair's trigger of mutual annihilation.

In 1945, the U.S. ended World War II as the sole nuclear power, but a nuclear power without a single nuclear bomb. Apart from the challenge of finding enough fissionable material, it turned out that assembling and maintaining a nuclear weapon weighing nearly 4,000 pounds was a difficult matter. Even so, as postwar tensions grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—and as America's conventional forces shrank with demobilization and Russia's did not—it became clear that the U.S. was going to need more of these two-ton bombs, and more super-bombers to deliver them. Strategic Air Command was created for the purpose. Once the Soviet Union went nuclear in 1949, the effort became even more urgent.

It was dangerous work. Jet-propulsion aviation was still in its infancy, and the planes built for SAC, like the B-47 and B-52, were ventures into the aeronautics unknown. Crashes and deaths were a regular feature of SAC duty. Accidentally dropped or even exploded atomic bombs were too.

Between 1956 and 1961 the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy received no less than two dozen letters detailing accidents involving a nuclear weapon that had been damaged or lost. One of them still is. According to Mr Keeney, the nuclear portion of a thermonuclear device that was dropped by accident on Jan. 24, 1961, still lies in a field somewhere near Goldsboro, NC.

The thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952, had the advantage of being not only far more destructive than its atomic elder sister but easier and lighter to build. As the number of Soviet airfields, air-defense systems and military targets grew, so did need for more American bombs. Initial plans to bomb 20 Soviet cities with 30 A-bombs soon evolved into 104 cities with 292 bombs. The hydrogen-bomb revolution enabled each side to rapidly expand its arsenal faster to respond to the other.

To be ready in case of war, SAC had to be on alert 24/7, flying and refueling around the clock. Patrols called Chrome Domes started in 1961, with some B-29s flying routes around the North Pole while others crossed the Atlantic to Spain and back. Tanker crews had to supply more than a half-million gallons of fuel every day in dangerous midair refuelings. The men of SAC formed a community apart. They had their own bases, their own psychological testing and their own annual proficiency tests, whose written portion consisted of an exam in which everyone who scored 100% passed and anyone who scored 99% or below failed.

"If you weren't in SAC you simply didn't have the same high sense of urgency," SAC's official historian once explained. "You could not keep up." In the early days, most crews assumed that they were headed on a one-way mission if nuclear war came. Later they knew that Soviet air defenses would devote no less than six fighters and an unknown number of missiles to shooting down every B-52 that crossed into Soviet territory.

But the crews also knew that, in their favor, they had their intense training and Gen. Curtis LeMay. For a figure so reviled by America's intelligentsia, LeMay has been lucky in getting fair biographers: recently Warren Kozak and now Mr. Keeney, who gives a full and vivid portrait of LeMay in "15 Minutes."

LeMay was a tough, taciturn man who kept his promises. He had promised that he could defeat Japan from the air in World War II and had done it. At the start of the Cold War he promised that he could keep a blockaded Berlin alive from the air and had done it. When he took over SAC in 1946, he promised that he would maintain a force that could deliver annihilation against our Cold War enemies at any time and under any conditions. He kept that promise, too.

15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown To Nuclear Annihilation

By L. Douglas Keeney St. Martin's, 372 pages, $26.99

By 1962, SAC had grown to 2,613 bombers and tankers, with 27,387 weapons in the stockpile. Meanwhile the Russians had barely 3,300 bombs—a deficit that contributed to their decision to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The growing shift to ICBMs (to missiles delivering warheads instead of planes) would enable them to close the gap.

To LeMay's credit, he never begrudged the move toward a missile-based nuclear arsenal. He saw the utility of it, both in cost and in the speed with which it could penetrate Soviet defenses. But he still saw the need for the human factor. A SAC B-52 could be sent out on a show of force, to stand an opponent down. It could go up and observe. And if someone made a mistake, it could turn around and come home.

On Jan. 29, 1968, the Strategic Air Command stopped carrying nuclear weapons during airborne alert missions. Nearly 25 years later, when the Soviet Union was no more, SAC itself ceased to exist. The men who flew its planes hadn't won the Cold War, but they had kept us from losing it. "Those were long sorties, over 24 hours, and you could come down pretty tired," recalled one pilot, "but I think having the weapons was an attention getter and there was always the possibility you might be needed." Such dedication to dangerous work—on the part of everyone involved in the Strategic Air Command, not least LeMay himself—deserves to be recognized and honored. Thanks to Mr. Keeney, it now is.

—Mr. Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the arsenal of democracy.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.